Open Letter to Kevin Rose — Please sign in the comments with your name (and user name) if you agree with the contents of this letter. — An open letter to Kevin Rose — By Muhammad Saleem & Mark Johnson — November 4, 2006 — Dear Kevin, — Please do not take this as an attack on Digg, the Digg team, or yourself.

Kevin Rose Failing Social Media 101 Miserably — Of course, I'm not talking about that 150 million dollar evaluation floating around, nor the rumours that Digg will be scooped up by Fox any minute to turn it into a MySpace Widget. — No — I'm referring to the latest algorithm change over at Digg.

The Delicate Balance of Participatory Media — As participatory media goes mainstream, media companies are discovering that it's a lot easier to hop on the ideological bandwagon of participation than it is to actually do participatory media well. — Along with the upside of "crowdsourcing" …

Digg to Top Users: QUIT NOW? — Seems like the changes to the front page promotion algorithm have been drastic. After scrolling through the last 48 hours worth of stories promoted to the front page I counted a total of 2 stories submitted by top 25 users on Digg.

More from the Vloggies — OK, I have a complete list of winners from the Vloggies up now — the big winners was Alive in Baghdad (they got the only standing ovation of the evening). Interestingly enough, before the Vloggies, I had never seen their stuff and it really is incredible.

The Vloggies was the Rite-Spot Saturday — The place to be Saturday evening was the Vloggies Awards in San Francisco- the best of the best video bloggers. — Organized by PodTech, co-founded by John Furrier, the event brought together an eclectic, and very much a San Francisco crowd.

GOOGLE VIDEO LOSES NBA, GAINS FREE NHL VIDEOS — The NBA has terminated its sale of game videos on Google Video, a partnership that would have been ten months old tomorrow. That would typically indicate either dissatisfaction with Google's video store model, the NBA wanting more money …

FON buys GSpace, Will Add Storage to WiFi — FON, the Madrid, Spain-based WiFi services company has bought the popular Firefox extension, GSpace, for an undisclosed amount, according company officials. The FireFox extension was developed by Rahul Jonna and allows users to treat their GMail accounts as an online file storage locker.

Netscape To Move From Tech/Politics Focus — Netscape, the five month-old Digg-clone experiment, is testing out two alternate home page designs with users in an attempt to increase the popularity of little-used topical categories. — I spoke with Jason Calacanis, who runs the Netscape property …

New views of Netscape Homepage/Hive — The Netscape homepage has been taken over by political stories. I hate politics, and seeing 1/3rd of the stories on the home page related to "Bush Sucks/Is Great" stories has really burned many of the users out. — You see, people vote 2-3x …

Office 2007 RTMs? Vista up next — Checking around the Web this weekend, there are a couple of reports — unconfirmed by Microsoft officials, as far as I can tell — that Office 2007 was released to manufacturing some time after Friday evening, and that Vista is set to RTM on November 8.

Quintura - Visual Find Engine — Quintura is the next-generation web search with a mission to make Web search easier and faster by adding context or meaning to keywords and visualizing search. — I love when a site gives you the ability to search by tags (del.icio.us - for example) I always find it more easy to use.

Blogging is great — People have, since it started, complained about the fact that there is junk on the web. And as a universal medium, of course, it is important that the web itself doesn't try to decide what is publishable. The way quality works on the web is through links.

Mark Jung Leaves FIM/IGN; No Immediate Replacement As COO — Now I really wish I'd started a pool when Mark Jung, co-founder of IGN and CEO when it was acquired by News Corp., took the job as COO of Fox Interactive Media. Roughly eight months into his tenure, Jung has resigned quietly as COO.

Macarena: once again no more than a demo virus for Mac OS X — Symantec has been predicting for quite a while now that virus authors would increasingly dedicate their attention to the Mac platform and that Macs were becoming a tempting target for hackers. However, a newly discovered Mac OSX virus …